Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “But—I’m supposed to be a mage—I should have been there, helping him—” Darian was overwhelmed with shame and guilt, so much so that he was not certain he had spoken aloud until Snowfire shook his head.

  “Darian, you will not come into the full potential of your ability for at least another two, perhaps three years,” the Hawkbrother replied. “Maybe more. And even then, you could not use that potential without several years of training, study, and practice. Even if you had begun training seriously three years ago, you would not have been ready to help Justyn now. You would have been of no more use to him than—than if you were going to be a fighter, and he was an older warrior. Your strength as a mage is something that you must grow into, as you would grow into your strength as a fighter. There is a perfectly good reason why armies do not field ranks full of younglings your age—and it is the same reason why you would have been of little help to Justyn even if you had been training to your utmost.”

  “Yes, but—” Darian began, then stopped, unable to articulate why he was so certain that if he had been there helping Justyn, the old wizard would still be alive, only sure that it was so.

  “You feel differently, and I cannot convince you otherwise.” Snowfire shrugged a little. “There is no arguing with a feeling; I wish that there was. But Darian, you cannot take on guilt for every bad thing that has happened! Put the guilt where it rightly belongs, at least—for if someone had not decided that it is easier to steal from innocents instead of earning their desires, that army would not have appeared on the road to Errold’s Grove in the first place! If there is blame to be placed, then place it squarely on the back of the aggressor who is leading these fighters, whoever he is! It is he who deserves to be punished, not your people, and not you!”

  Darian was struck by the good common sense of that, and felt a little of the burden he was carrying inside ease. “I—I guess you’re right.”

  “I know I am,” Snowfire said firmly. “And I know that you are feeling very strange and worn. But now, I have something difficult that I must ask of you. Adept Starfall and I asked questions of you last night, when you were very tired, but we need to ask more of you now that you are well awake and thinking. And the sooner we can ask you these things, the fresher they will be in your mind. Do you think that you can manage such a thing for us, when you are clean and fed?”

  Darian’s heart sank. He really did not want to go over all of yesterday’s horrible events, but he knew that he really needed to say “Yes.”

  “I—yes,” he replied, in a small voice.

  “Good, and you are being quite brave to face what you will have to remember,” Snowfire told him, so earnestly that he did not doubt that Snowfire actually meant the words, and wondered at Snowfire calling him brave. “Now, I will explain to you why we are going to need to know very many tiny details. My people are allies of your people, and we have taken on certain responsibilities. We are, all of us, mages—some with less power than you have at this moment, and some, like Starfall, with a very, very great deal more—but all of us are mages. That makes my people very different, and it makes us very desirable to other mages.” Snowfire bit his lip as he looked down at Darian for a moment, as if he were debating something, and then his expression settled, as if he had decided to let Darian hear more confidences. “There are—ways—that a mage can use another mage, even if that other is an unwilling prisoner. That is why we must be careful that we do not fall into the hands of mages who are working evil.”

  Darian shivered all over. Was that why that huge fighter who’d caught him hadn’t killed him? Vague and ill-defined pictures flitted through his mind, all of them ugly.

  “We are only a very small party of Tayledras,” Snowfire continued. “We must know as much about this enemy as possible. We need to know if we can and should attack him ourselves, if we should merely interfere with him but let your Valdemaran fighters deal with him, or if we should actually hide from him. Do you see why we must do that?”

  Perhaps one of the other boys from Errold’s Grove would not have, but Darian did. He nodded. “I can see it wouldn’t make any difference if you waited, so long as everybody got away,” he replied. “I mean, what’s the point of risking yourself for a bunch of old houses? Right? It isn’t as if the people couldn’t rebuild, or even move.” He bit his lip. “Maybe now they’ll be willing to settle somewhere else. They surely weren’t prospering there.”

  “That is correct,” Snowfire said, looking relieved. “Your Queen once said something both wise and profound when she ordered the evacuation of the Eastern Border—that it was not the land that was Valdemar, it was the people. It is not the houses that were your village, it was your people. If the people have survived, then the village has, regardless of whether or not the houses are still there.”

  Darian nodded solemnly. “They could even still call themselves ‘Errold’s Grove’ if they wanted to.” He toyed with a bit of fringe on the blanket that had covered him last night. “I would understand if you decided not to fight—them—right away. I mean, as long as everybody got away all right. And if there’s a mage with these fighters, you probably shouldn’t let him know that there are more mages here—”

  “There is certainly a mage behind them somewhere,” Snowfire interrupted. “Perhaps more than one. Those bear-men you saw could not have been made that way without a mage. And Darian, quite frankly, if there are no people who are in need of rescue, the very best thing that we can do is to stay away from those fighters.”

  “Why?” Darian asked, a little surprised at his vehemence.

  “Do you recall what I told you about what the Tayledras are doing in your land? How we are making the channels for magic to flow in?” Snowfire waited expectantly, his head tilted a little to one side.

  Darian closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded as memory-fog cleared. “And … you said that you were doing that so that a bad mage couldn’t get the magic locked away from everybody else and… .” He suddenly felt a number of things fall into place in his mind. “Oh! Since there’s a mage there, he might try and lock the magic away!”

  “I am almost positive that is exactly why he is here,” Snowfire said grimly. “I frankly cannot imagine why the enemy would attack your little village except for that purpose; if a special place for gathering magic is nearby, he would have a ready-built headquarters from which to work, and a food supply already gathered. And that is why it is our first and best duty to prevent him from accomplishing that task.”

  Darian sighed. He could certainly see Snowfire’s point, and as long as everyone was safe, what would the Hawkbrothers accomplish by fighting? Hadn’t he just been thinking that there wasn’t anything worth bothering about in Errold’s Grove? Hadn’t he just told Snowfire that it might even be better if the people went somewhere better to resettle?

  Still, the idea of a bunch of fur-covered bullies just coming in and taking everything and not being made to pay for it made him angry. And after what Justyn did—

  No, Justyn couldn’t have thought he was saving the village, just the people. He must have known that there wasn’t a chance of saving anything else. So I shouldn’t get all worked up over them taking the village.

  “Darian, are you ready to help us?” Snowfire asked, interrupting him midway through his attempt to sort out his feelings.

  “I guess so,” he began vaguely, and before he could have second thoughts, Snowfire had gotten him out of the hut, through a little maze of vine-covered barriers, and he was suddenly confronting, not one or two, but ten or twelve of the Hawkbrothers, each of them with his or her own bird perched on a shoulder or arm. They sat together in a sunny, circular clearing with a tiny stream running along one side. They’d taken their seats either on the ground, or on natural objects such as boulders or pieces of log. All of them were clearly waiting for him, and as Snowfire sat him down in the middle of this half-circle of people, and stood discreetly aside, Darian felt himself to be the uncomfortable focus of their interest. />
  Although all of the people here had the same sort of green-and-brown clothing that Snowfire wore, no two costumes were alike, and although many had heavy leather gloves on one or both hands, none of them wore the same shoulder-to-wrist gauntlet that he did. All of the birds were enormous, and of the breeds that Darian recognized, these individuals were twice and three times bigger than the ones Darian knew. There were three people with large hawks with vivid rusty-orange and golden-yellow tails, two with thin and nervous hawks with yellow-orange eyes and pale, almost pinkish breasts, three with falcons that looked just like forestgyres, two with ones that looked like peregrines, one with a slate-gray bird with aggressive, reddish eyes that must have been a goshawk of some sort, and one with a huge, clever-looking crow. No one else had an owl of any kind. The birds all watched Darian with interest and intelligence, and Darian had the peculiar feeling that they heard and understood every word that was being said.

  Another person came around a screen of vines, a most impressive and exotically-dressed man with waist-length white hair, who had a white falcon with pale brown markings perched on a pad on his shoulder. This person’s robes were so elaborately cut and layered that it was obvious he could never have gone scouting about through the forest as the others did—so this must be the Adept that Snowfire had been talking about. Something about him seemed very familiar, and as the Adept spoke quietly with Snowfire and one or two of the others, Darian finally remembered why. He’d met this man last night, and the man had questioned him with Snowfire’s assistance, because his Valdemaran hadn’t been anywhere near as good as Snowfire’s. This was Starfall, who must be a very powerful mage indeed, if the deference the other Hawkbrothers showed him was any indication.

  As Darian found himself to be the focus of all those eyes, avian as well as human, he began to recall how often he managed to get himself into trouble—and that was with people he knew! How could he hope to do anything other than get himself into worse trouble with these folk? And what must they think of him for running away the way he had? Surely they must think he was a dreadful coward at best, and at worst—

  At worst, they must think he was good for nothing except to get them into more trouble. His heart sank, and he began to feel utterly worthless. What good was he? What good had he ever been? Surely these people could only wish him gone out of their lives.

  He began to be a little bit afraid of them, too. Oh, Snowfire seemed approachable and normal enough, but the rest of these folk—well, they were the mysterious and dangerous guardians of the Forest. Who knew what strange customs they had? What if they decided to make him disappear? After all, if he disappeared, there would be less trouble all the way around.

  Snowfire and the Adept finished their conversation and came over to Darian, and took seats beside him with him placed between the two of them. That took him aback; he’d expected to be sitting alone, surrounded by strangers, all of them interrogating him. But it seemed as if Starfall and Snowfire had made themselves his advocates, of a sort.

  “We’d like to begin now, if you are ready?” Snowfire said, phrasing the words as a question.

  “I guess I am,” Darian replied, a bit shaken.

  “Some of our scouts do not know your tongue at all, and most do not know it as well as I do,” Snowfire told him, by way of explanation. “So. They will ask the question, and I will act as translator—or I will clarify what they are asking. I would like you to think back to just before you saw the signs of the attack. Had you seen or heard anything in the past few weeks to make you think that there might be such an attack?”

  Darian shook his head. “No,” he said truthfully, then added, “but the people don’t go out of the village much, and especially not into the Forest. So they might not see anything. Justyn—” his voice quavered, “—Justyn wasn’t much good at ForeSight. He could see the weather all right, but never anything on the ground. That was how we got caught by a flood last fall—the rain that caused it was way up north, he didn’t ForeSee it, and of course he didn’t ForeSee the way it would make the river rise.” He shook his head. “Everybody was so afraid of the Forest that they wouldn’t stir past the fields if they could help it, and nobody was due to go over to one of the other towns for trading for a while.”

  Snowfire translated, and some of the scouts discussed what he had said among themselves. “Are towns there, to your north?” called out one.

  Darian had to think hard about that one—Justyn had been making him memorize maps, but he had a poor head for it. He had much better luck in remembering things by means of landmarks than by arbitrary marks on a piece of paper. “I don’t think so,” he said, trying to be honest. “That is, I think that the ones north of us are all a lot farther east as well. I think—” He closed his eyes, and tried to visualize the map he’d been studying. “I think that the border here kind of sticks out in a bump pointing west, and we’re at the tip of the bump.”

  There was more discussion, and some sketching in the sand. “Let us go forward then, to the time of the attack,” Starfall said carefully. “When did you first know that there was something wrong?”

  “I was up in a tree, looking for mycofoetida fungus,” he replied. “I was pretty high, because we’d kind of harvested everything that was near the ground and near the town. So the first thing I saw was that there were big fires in town.”

  One of the Hawkbrothers with a forestgyre said something to Snowfire, who relayed the question. “So the attack had already begun?”

  Darian shook his head. “No—no, not yet. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew something had to be wrong, so I left the basket and ran back to town, and what was burning, mostly, was haystacks and sheds, and just a few of them. And I saw Vere—that was one of the farmers—setting a fire himself. I guess they were burning things to keep the bad people from getting them.”

  Now discussion among the scouts lasted for some time, before another called out a question that Snowfire translated. “What did the army look like? Exactly? Can you remember any numbers?”

  He shuddered at that one, but he had expected that it would be coming, and he closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene at the bridge. “There was Justyn on the bridge,” he said slowly. “Then there was the big monster with the little monster riding on it. Then there were some of the bear-men—they were five across the road, and I think four lines of five—then behind them was a bunch of human people with tall spears—” He tried so hard to visualize the scene that he began to get a headache. “I couldn’t see behind them very far, but there were a lot of them. They were lined up on the road five across, and—I remember so many spears sticking up in the air that it looked like a burned forest was on the road, for as far back as I could see.”

  He opened his eyes at the murmur of surprise, but now attention was completely off him for the moment, as the Hawkbrothers discussed possible numbers represented by what he remembered. From their worried faces, he gathered that the implications weren’t good.

  “Were all the bear-men on the bridge?” Starfall asked him quietly.

  “I think so,” he said, just as quietly. “But I don’t know for sure, because I ran. Some of them might have jumped into the river, and some of them might have gotten out of the way.”

  “And some might have been farther back in the ranks,” Snowfire pointed out.

  Starfall sighed and nodded agreement. “Did you see anyone that—” He groped for words for a moment, then said something incomprehensible to Snowfire.

  “Did you see anyone who looked like a mage?” Snowfire asked, then raised one eyebrow as if aware of the uselessness of such a question.

  “I didn’t see anyone wearing fancy robes, or who looked like he was doing any magic,” Darian replied, trying to be as exact as possible. “The thing on the lizard acted more like—like—somebody who was in charge of things, but not really in charge of everything, if you get my meaning. He acted like somebody who had to answer to somebody else. And when he got caught in the
fire, the rest of ‘em acted like it was no great thing that he wasn’t there. Like maybe they were getting orders from somebody behind them.”

  Darian was doing his best to answer the questions to the fullest, but the more he had to think about Justyn, to see the scene in his mind, the worse he felt. He was doing his best to hold back tears, but it wasn’t easy.

  And it didn’t get any easier. “Where were the rest of your people at the time the bridge was destroyed?” Starfall asked.

  “Gone,” Darian told him glumly. “They were all running away from the village when I was running toward it.”

  “And you turned to run when the bridge was destroyed?” That was one of the scouts, a very young man whose face Darian remembered from last night.

  He hung his head, not liking to think what they must believe of him for running. “Yes,” he admitted, flushing hotly, from the top of his head on down.

  “And where were the enemy then?” the young man persisted. “Still on the other side of the river?”

  Darian looked up, surprised to see that there was no open scorn in their faces. “No—” he told them. “No, some of them were on the other side when I got out to the fields. I guess they must have forded the river, or something, but they were working their way through the fields, I guess to keep people from escaping.”